Embarking On Our Healing: A New Journey Begins
By Michael Lewin : www.michaellewin.org
To retain the ‘store’ of negative perspectives on our pain is to retain its stranglehold on us. It’s conceding to our capture, holding us to ransom, bullying and imprisoning us. This fear based thinking and acting must be fundamentally altered if we are to start on our journey of progression. We need to look for alternative, positive narratives to undermine and replace the harmful and hurtful stories we keep telling ourselves about ‘our pain’ and the resulting suffering we are experiencing – alternative narratives that can take us onwards to better days. They do exist and therefore it becomes our primary imperative to find them, to experiment and leave no stone unturned in our quest.
“Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision, for the limits of the world”
Schopenhauer
If we fully accept compassion and forgiveness in our lives – for others, and importantly for ourselves – then we will start to shift our mental outlook into another place where spaciousness and expansiveness work and where the dynamics of healing resides. Experiment, re-invent, come to see your suffering not as a fixed, unshifting ‘entity’ that cast a permanent dark shadow over your life but rather an experience to explore for further understanding and hence conquest.
The universe is undoubtedly benign, for it supports and sustains all our lives on this planet earth. But what we do with them, where we take them, how we treat them is up to us – a magnificent ‘contract’ of possible epic proportions.
If you are seeking a better life you must do the work, I mean really do the work, commit one hundred percent to achieving it, if you really want to succeed.
We must never forget that despite all the traumas and tribulations, the anguish and heartache that have shadowed our lives there still resides deep within us a still, silent space that contains a real, authentic peace and vital harmony that holds our life together.
After its initial impact, we must come to see that the adversity that has swept into our lives contains the potential to deepen us – strengthening our character and building up our resilience. Never, ever ‘waste’ it, always use it for further understanding, for ‘fuel to burn’ on an ongoing journey into what it is to be human.
We must avoid ‘habitualizing’ our pain, treating it as a normal everyday occurrence that has a permanent ‘residence’ in our lives. This all too easily helps to put a stranglehold on us that becomes increasingly very difficult to shift. But shift it we must if we are to go forward.
Healing involves us in bringing together all the loose, fragmented parts of us that we have ignored, denied, repressed or abused – gathering them up into an integrated wholeness. Obviously this takes time and much energy, but it is essential work if we are to become our full selves again.
We must endeavour to embrace an attitude that places our pain in an open, non-judgmental space for a healing to surface. Avoiding, at all cost, the attitude of combative fighting which can only leave it in the darkest shadows where anxiousness and foreboding abound.
We do have control over our lives and we do need to believe this, act on it and reinforce it on a regular basis with positive attitudes and behaviour. There is no other way – believe that from adopting a positive mind set, new ideas, fresh perspectives can surface to take us forward.
The challenge for us is to not accept things at face value but to probe deeper and ever deeper. Living on the surface of life – which is easily done for most of us – makes us susceptible to superficial appraisals, premature judgments, misplaced decisions and therefore acceptance of our plight. But by probing deeper, by looking at things in a fresh light, by considering all our options it is possible to find new solutions which can ease our journey back into wholeness.
